Be More Bookish : Final Thoughts

So, what is my take-away from this adventure?

Overall, this training made an appeciable difference in how I provided Reader's Services.  I really came to appreciate the methods on how to 'structure' a conversation regarding reader advisory - fortunately for me, I learned a lot prior to this program, and in some of my grad school classes.  Indirectly, this program helped in that I engaged colleagues in conversation on a given week's topic, and it made our Librarian meetings more productive when we would do a roundtable "book talk" for that month.  It became a lot easier for me to incorporate those practices at these meetings, let alone in my regular work out on the public floor. 

I liked several aspects of the training - the genre flowchart, as a concept, is nice. The only thing about that is it just may be better serving if it were a PowerPoint, or a list, rather than a Prezi presentation.  Its not something that is being 'presented' and narrated by another person to an audience, so it wasn't super-conducive to self-directed learning. 

I would suggest a few things for improvement:

Reorder the Priorities

I was confused as to why we were waiting until Weeks 4-7 to then build base knowledge. That, in my mind, should be some of the earliest parts of the program - otherwise, how are we going to structure the RA conversation, or utilize tools and sites like Goodreads and NoveList properly? I feel it'd better to have the basics, and then work with the extra tools at hand.

Clarify Instructions\Scope

I recall many colleagues (and myself) being vexed when Week 6's assignment - building base knowledge of genres - asked them to recall the Genre blogs they were following in Week 1.  While Week 1 asks us to select a genre site and follow it, it makes no mention that it'll be almost five weeks later that we will do something with that.

Likewise, when we were asked to find "fan" sites of particular subgenres, many of us shared that we just couldn't find anything past user-generated lists on Goodreads - I felt like we were sent on a wild goose chase for that assignment.

Week 9: Book Trailers

Last week!

I can't really say I am super-impressed by the book trailers I viewed - which included several designed for young adults.  They seem quite cheesy, and a lot of them have a real "filmed in somebody's back yard" kind of quality to them - I was really displeased with the trailer for Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls - the bizarre elements that are intrinsic to the "Quirk Classics" series of novels was lost in a morass of bad acting.  The trailers for the Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare was considerably better, on the other hand, with just better directing all around. 

In both instances, I would have been much more receptive as I like those kind of subgenres.  I am sure that book trailers may have some kind of kitschy appeal to some audiences, but if anything it largely turned me off on some of those books.  In light of this, I am rather disinclined to use these trailers as a means of promoting a book or providing reader services - the trailers either take themselves too seriously (ITS THE NEXT GREAT EPIC NOVEL - WITH VAMPIRES!) or is just so bad that it looks like a joke.  If I was certain my advisee was going to like something like this, then I'd encourage them to look into it.

Week 8

Food - 641.5973 - Adam Richman's America the Edible: a Hungry History, from Sea to Dining Sea.

Science - 539.7 - Ian Sample's Massive: the Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science

Medicine - 616 - Michelle Au's This Won't Hurt a Bit: My Education in Medicine and Motherhood

Sports - 797.32 - Beth Hamilton's Soul Surfer


I would recommend Adam Richman's America the Edible to a customer who is looking for a little inspiration on where to travel - and, more importantly, where and what to eat while they're there.  Richman is also the host of Travel Channel's Man vs. Food program, wherein he travels to different cities to sample the local fare and undertake different food-related challenges.  Customers looking for a little humor and a little history behind these locales would find this book to be an interesting read - it contains not only that, but some recommended eating spots and recipes based on his travels in the region. 

This Won't Hurt a Bit, by Michelle Au, tells the story of balancing a life of medical school, and then trying to balance being a mother with her medical residency.  She tells her personal story in this book, trading between stories both triumphant and tragic - both at home and work.  The author manages to relate her own journey in a way that anyone - including someone who is not a medical professional - can pick up and relate to.

Week 7

I always found it strange that there was so much time and effort devoted to distinguishing between "teen" and "tween", "young adult" and "new adult".  I think the moniker of "New Adult" is incredibly pointless, especially after reading Deahl's article.  It just further serves to confuse readers and it treads upon ground I feel has already been covered by the term "Young Adult".  Teens and adults, I feel, both know what they want to read - and trying to wedge them under some other label doesn't accomplish anything. 

The other article, "YA Comes of Age", acknowledges the trend that YA has been moving readers into older age brackets, and the demand for content has only gotten stronger as more "adult-adults" have trended into that particular marketing group.  A lot of the demand stems from the compelling content, which I would wager seems more "fresh" than more standard fare that has existed as Classic Adult literature.  Nevermind that the YA content runs dangerously close to repeating itself too much for its own good, the fact remains that there is still a lot of buyers and readers out there for it.

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I followed both John Green's Tumblr\Site and the "Forever Young Adult" sites.  Green's site was geared a little more towards "young" adults (think 'early 20s'), with a lot of humorous (or semi-humorous) topical posts on a wide variety of topics.  Most of those topics touch on current issues like gay marriage or the turmoil in Egypt.  He writes primarily to this audience, engaging them in discussions on these topics.  The Tumblr page is a little more 'connected' to his audience (whereas his site is a little more serious) and his fans (aka "Nerdfighters") are able to regularly communicate with him.

Forever Young Adult is a little more about media that is relevant to young adults - movies, books, and television.  Its written smartly, and carries additional interesting offerings like DIY projects and editorials.  Its written more broadly, so no one age range is focused on too extensively.  The site appeals to readers who like kitschy articles, and features a store of quirky merchandise - a bespoked peacock with an "Austentatious" caption elicited a good chuckle from me.

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A lot of forthcoming books - at least, from what I am reading on Harper and Tor Teen - is a lot of "something borrowed, something new".  Titles are described as drawing from classic authors (like Jane Austen) while engaging in a darker, more "fractured" method of storytelling.  In terms of genre, it seems that fantasy or sci-fantasy is the soup du jour, still!  Lots of vampires and werewolves, lots of moody settings.

Comments posted to Marilyn S.'s blog and Meliss B.'s

Week 6 : Genreflecting!

Reading over the Tor "Fiction Affliction" site has been nothing short of illuminating.  I have to stop myself from reserving/requesting ALL THE THINGS that I have been reading about, especially within the "Genre-Bending" posts.  I mean, with a novel titled "Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos", why wouldn't I reserve it?  It features scads of really interesting, quirky books that could appeal to Young Adults and Adults alike.

I could not really find any "cipher thriller" fan sites out there, despite using several variants of the term in engines like blekko and Google.  Ah well!  Maybe its some kind of cipher itself, involving ancient pictographs, and here I am without the key decoder.  A couple of key authors of this genre include Rick Riordan, Diana Gabaldon, and Craig Cormick.  The genre tends to be very plot-driven, often fast-paced and dramatic.  This particular subgenre tends to favor peppering their stories with historical minutiae, or elements of time travel.

There was a few meager results for "contemporary fiction westerns", including this blog post by Anaya Baker, and a Goodreads list of 20 recommended Westerns.  There is a directory of contemporary Western fiction as well.  A couple of authors that typify the genre include Zane Grey, Willa Cather, and Thomas Savage - these authors write character-focused works, with interpersonal drama a central facet of the story.

Same story for Christian urban fiction.  There are a few sites - including a Goodreads list and several booksellers with that subgenre as a category - on the topic but no particular "fandom" exists.  These particular books are defined usually by their dramatic and often moving tone, with engaging writing that is often character-driven.  A couple authors include Nikita Lynette Nichols, Victoria Christopher Murray, and E.N. Joy.

A pair of mashup titles I could find were:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, where it blends Monster Horror with the (classic) Regency Romance.  It takes the classic Jane Austen romance story, and peppers it liberally with zombies/"Dreadfuls" that have infested this particular universe - and the characters are altered to better 'deal' with the world around them while trying to ward off the advances of their suitors. 

The Emerald Burrito of Oz by John Skipp and Marc Levinthal is a mashup between the magical fantasy world of Oz and a tense, thrilling standoff with the "real" world.  The two universes have begun to "blend" together, and a man is caught in between a brewing conflict for control of the Emerald City - all the while dodging herds of sentient Hummers and dealing with hardbitten warriors Dorothy and Tin Man.

Week 5 : Base Knowledge

I had been following the Daily Beast off and on throughout this program.  I'm still super-enamored with the Cheat Sheet sidebar, with its mix of publishing news with national/world news.  Their "This Week's Hot Reads" is also useful, even if I have yet to really find any books on there that really catch my own interest.  In general, I like that the Daily Beast is a big news aggregator, even with a book publishing bent.
The NPR Books site has been very interesting.  I found out there is another Bridget Jones book coming soonish (after, what, 14 years?) and just today I was reading a hilarious retrospective on Superman comics and the BA-NA-NAS storylines they engaged in back in the 60s.

I took a look through Flavorpill's 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2013, and came across Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus.  Reading further into it, it's one of those reflective, coming-of-age kinds of stories that  has a unique twist in that a man and a boy have their lives "reset" - new names, and starting in a new country.  The boy is without a mother, so the man vows to reunite the child with his mother.  Just the blurb for this book is compelling enough for me to want to read it.

Week 4 : Goodreads

I had signed up for Goodreads in The Distant Past, when I was starry-eyed young thing.  I had added maybe two dozen books, a couple of coworkers as friends, connected it to Facebook, and promptly forgot about it after that point.  It wasn't until I was promoted to Librarian did I look into the service again.

I like the Listopia feature, but I don't like-like it.  It's not a very well curated area, in the sense that a lot of the lists suffer from just swarms of people piling on books each time.  Some items that appear on these lists are only tangentially-related to the lists's topic.  On the other hand, it came in handy when I had a customer asking about historical fiction - Goodreads' userbase had constructed a pretty comprehensive list, and most of the titles on it were ones we owned as a system. 

I feel the whole UI needs to be redone, however.  The whole thing just seems janky and uncoordinated.  It would likely intimidate the less computer-savvy users of the world, and thus they would opt to avoid a service that may otherwise be quite useful to them.

Annoying quirk - unless you are REALLY paying attention, you could be leaving yourself logged in on that site.  It can create an amusing comedy of errors at work, but its a stupid thing to default to when logging in to the site.  Users should be in control of their access, not have to be made to opt-out.

I commented on Rich S.'s review of a book, "Night of the Living Trekkies" by Kevin David Anderson.